Evolution navigated billions of challenges to get to us to where we are today. Directed evolution compresses this to a 1D axis. Imagine if you could sample 200 dimensions at once, with data to boot 📈 First @chorylab.bsky.social PACE preprint on our new system to tackle this: bit.ly/turboprance

Wahoooo it’s online!!! 🎉🥳 Excited to share a glimpse into my postdoc work with @chorye.bsky.social at Duke where @stefan-golas.bsky.social and I developed TurboPRANCE, a robotics platform to scale and enable new phage-assisted continuous evolutions. bskytorial party!👇 1/n

Sydney Peterson is among the U.S. athletes heading to the 2026 Winter Paralympics. A neuroscientist in training, Peterson is studying movement disorders, similar to her own condition. n.pr/3P0q28t

Rotation PhD student @emiliedevet.bsky.social in our lab made the Dish soap protocol work (on the first attempt) for a nuclear target with Dawn (the US version of dreft/fairy ) and thereby extended the dish soap protocol to a version for across the atlantic 🤩 @tothovalab.bsky.social #hemesky

NIH funding underlies all of these advances--support fundamental science, and the bridge from there to the clinic 🧪

Powerful piece in STAT this morning from some NIH staff members who have resigned www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n... 1/3

Bluesky community! This is my official NYC mayor account. I’ll be posting updates on what’s happening at City Hall and how we’re delivering for New Yorkers. It’s great to be here.

Happy holidays from all of us in the Chory Lab and our lab neighbors at Duke!☃️🎉 @chorylab.bsky.social @dukeubme.bsky.social

"The worm demonstrates that curiosity-driven science using a simple animal can not only illuminate biology but also help deliver medicines that change human lives (...) Discoveries from C. elegans research have impacted society beyond biomedical outcomes."

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

A reminder to use the right P2A sequence to produce separate proteins - the images are from a GPCR-P2A-mCherry construct using a P2A variant without (upper row) and with (lower row) a preceding GSG linker.

Two outstanding group leaders to watch!

Claude the Albino Alligator Passes Away at Age 30 Claude was an iconic California Academy of Sciences resident who many visitors formed deep connections with during his 17 year tenure @calacademy.bsky.social www.calacademy.org/press/releas...

Everyone shut thefuck up in that they discovered ribose and, for the first time in any extraterrestrialsample, glucose on Bennu. This adds to earlier this yr 14 of the 20 amino acids thatlife on Earth uses to make proteinsand all five nucleobases that lifeon Earth uses www.nasa.gov/missions/osi...

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

While the administration has said it is cutting “woke programs” that “poison the minds of Americans", it actually funded fewer grants in every area of science and medicine. “They brought everything to a stop,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the N.I.H.’s National Cancer Institute

Help chromatin friends! Looking for a paper and AI is failing. Study used CRISPR tech to perturb a variety of chromatin regulators to determine their functional importance on a number of different TFs. Main outcome was that different TFs = different chromatin regulators

Real tour de force, so many edited cell lines! 🔥🔥 Congrats @elphegenoralab.bsky.social and team!

Same as it ever was.

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

It's 2025 and excel still cant open two different worksheets with the same file name. Thank you for your attention to this matter

New preprint from the lab just dropped! Our continued partnership with Irfan Kathiriya from @ucsanfrancisco.bsky.social on gene regulatory networks in atrial disease modeling using iPS cells www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

IDT prices seem to inflate like groceries these days. Highly recommend 10nm scale for >60nt oligos from GeneWiz, best deal on the market I've seen-- even if you have to wait a few days. Cheapest gene block synthesis now from Twist also.

Our work on rationally engineering allosteric protein switches is now out in Nature Methods: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thanks a lot to @grunewald.bsky.social and @noahholzleitner.bsky.social for the comprehensive news and views: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

To better treat cancer, we need to understand its underlying biology. Despite decades of research, some fundamental questions remain unanswered. One is why certain key tumor suppressor or oncogenes lead to cancer predominantly in single tissue: e.g. Rb in the retina, or APC in the colon 1/n 🧪

Noncanonical amino acids are efficiently incorporated into proteins by optimizing mRNA codon usage go.nature.com/3MDSSXQ rdcu.be/exfiH

Cachexia (which I now know how to pronounce) is an awful and overlooked part of cancer. At least reducing this indignity would be great

amazing new discovery by my @gladstoneinst.bsky.social and @ucsanfrancisco.bsky.social colleagues, on cell-directed combination therapy for Alzheimer's disease. Although having seen first-hand what irinotecan does, I wouldn't recommend it. Proof of principle impressive. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Fabulous post by @randomwalker.bsky.social & Sayash raising the same concern many of us have about whether we're on the right track with how we're using AI for science. Everyone should read it, take a deep breath & think through the implications. www.aisnakeoil.com/p/could-ai-s...

long-time coming, multi-lab paper on the evolution of gene regulation in the tetrapod heart. I actually did the mouse and chick embryo heart dissections for this one! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Biomedical research is facing a funding crisis. Cuts to federal funding will mean fewer medical breakthroughs, less economic growth, and loss of opportunities for early-career scientists, and loss of our country's leadership in life science. Here's what you should know about the proposed cuts. 🧵

Just reminded of the new NIH public access policy in effect today-- researchers now required to deposit new publications resulting from NIH-funding into PubMed Central immediately upon publication independent of open access status. No need to pay extra for open access anymore? Smells like progress

Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't want you to know the name of her opponent but will try every desperate attempt to save her seat. My name is Shawn Harris. I am a Democrat, husband, father, Retired Brigadier General, farmer, and I'm running against MTG. Can you spread the word?

Duke appears to have lost NIH grants because they used the prefix "trans" in reference to disease transmission, transgenic genetic material, translational studies, or signal transduction www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

🚨 NEW PUBLICATION 🚨 "An experimental census of retrons for DNA production and genome editing" @natbiotech.nature.com @seth-shipman.bsky.social

I am very proud that the public, through NIH, has built such a powerful and successful enterprise to understand and treat diseases like cancer. I am very sad that this research enterprise at NIH is suffering such damage. That’s bad for patients, bad for the economy, bad for all of us. 🧪

Happy to share a new publication: an introduction to comparative oncology in @natrevcancer.nature.com‬. Thanks to the leaders in the field for welcoming me as an invertebrate researcher. rdcu.be/etKdN

Warnock: A budget is not just a fiscal document. A budget is a moral document. Show me your budget and I'll show you who you think matters and who doesn't. And if this awful budget were an EKG, it would suggest that our nation has a heart problem and is in need of moral surgery

So unless something changes the NIH budget for FY26 remains at the FY25 levels (which is really the FY24 levels) ~48 billion. Not great in absolute terms but a hella lot better than what the white house and house wanted. Same with NSF - stays at ~9

Thanks to WRAL for documenting the tremendous impact of the Trump administration efforts to end important research grants www.wral.com/news/local/u...

MassLive.com recently interviewed several Harvard FlyBase people and wrote this news article about the importance of FlyBase: tinyurl.com/4chpts9f

Breaking news: The National Institutes of Health has ceased terminating grants on politically sensitive topics after a federal judge ruled last week that the cancellations were illegal. scim.ag/4l9MO8Y

Demand an affidavit ballot and submit it. Your vote will count.

I’ve never published a paper where peer review didn’t meaningfully improve the science and how we communicated it. The difference between our preprints and final papers is always striking. So how do we preserve what works and fix what’s broken?

📢BREAKING: Just left the courthouse for our NIH grant termination case Judge ruled terminations are “VOID & ILLEGAL” As a plaintiff, I felt a wave of relief & hope; he acknowledged the discrimination & harm Closed by asking, ‘Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?’

progress! @nytimes.com reports: A federal judge ordered the government to restore funding to hundreds of grants issued by the NIH that had been cut by the Trump administration, ruling that the government had discriminated against minorities and L.G.B.T.Q. individuals.

NIH grants are in purgatory or being terminated left and right... but my F32 uh gets a small budget increase? Posting for public transparency, not clear in the NoA why the change yet #science #nih #grants

Please join the chorus of voices, including my own, in support of the talented, hardworking and dedicated scientists and staff at NIH. They serve their country by deploying their training and skills to improve the health and quality of life of all Americans 🙏 🇺🇸